


tangos to be danced alone

by fab_ia



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, Second person POV, brief violence but not massively graphic, coffee from the perspective of a non-coffee drinker, crap hotel breakfasts, maxwell staring at kepcobi and just sighing because they're idiots, ruminations on weird workplace relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24189565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fab_ia/pseuds/fab_ia
Summary: "you watch them, in some strange and twisted dance with each other, rarely even touching."(alana considers her coworkers relationship, and why daniel ever comes to her for advice about it)
Relationships: Daniel Jacobi & Alana Maxwell, Daniel Jacobi & Warren Kepler & Alana Maxwell, Daniel Jacobi/Warren Kepler
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	tangos to be danced alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gansbee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gansbee/gifts).



you watch them, locked in some strange and twisted dance with each other, rarely touching or even coming close, apprehensive partners. you think that it’ll last until one dies or gives up on this entirely. one leads, the other follows, their roles shifting accordingly with the ways their dynamic shifts in life, too. you don’t join their dance - a tango is for two, not three - but you are their closest observer, the judge, the partial impartial party, their biased unbiased watcher.

here is the dancefloor tonight - the doorway of a hotel room, while you shed the outer layers of clothing you’d donned for your day out, for the vetting. stalking. the two words, usually so different, are interchangeable and so frequently interchanged, in this line of work. 

you sit on the bed near the window as you pull off the dampened sweater, dropping it to the floor before you look back up to where jacobi’s leaning one arm on the frame, using the meagre height advantage to lean down when he presses his lips to kepler’s. you look away, but you still hear them, kepler’s whisper of  _ good work _ against jacobi’s jaw before he takes a step back and clears his throat, repeats it loud enough to be sure you’ve heard. he doesn’t play favourites, after all. obviously.

jacobi - daniel, now, after the mask of professionalism has been shed - drops down onto the bed beside you after he shuts the door and toes off his boots, looking up at the ceiling with a furrowed brow and a sigh. you run a hand through his hair absently, phone in your other hand as you flick technicolour blocks into their proper position. 

“what the fuck,” he says, half to you and half to himself, and you hum noncommittally, scratching your blunt nails against his scalp a little. “alana, what the fuck are we doing?”

“you and him or all of us in a more cosmic and existential sense?”

he rolls his eyes and you laugh, closing the app and moving to lay next to him. “you know i mean … him. me. him and me. whatever.”

and this conversation is one you come back to a lot - mostly late at night, after glasses of too-sweet drinks or wine that’s stained your lips burgundy in lieu of lipstick - one you’ve bookmarked and promised to come back to at a later date. sometimes you wonder why daniel asks you but you think you might be the only friend he’s ever really had and that aches in the same places it makes you feel light.

you don’t have the answers, here. he could ask you anything about binary, coding and artificial intelligence, life that is so different and arguably superior to humans, beyond the confines of flesh-and-blood-and-bone. sometimes you envy that, far too intimately acquainted with viscera from your day job, palms stained scarlet as you’ve stitched up a wound in kepler’s side enough for him to keep taking shuddering, heaving breaths. gears and wires below the skin would be far simpler to cope with. still, you exist in the body your parents crafted for you from clay, stained with damp earth, moulded you into their perfect daughter before you managed to break out of the confines with blunted kitchen scissors and your once-pristine braid jagged on the bathroom tiles. you are not theirs to dictate your life, your body, the way you look and act. 

daniel falls asleep with his head against your chest, face against the soft cotton of a t-shirt you stole from his closet months ago. once, maybe, it was borrowed, given to save you going home in one stained with something, but now it serves its purpose as one you wear to bed more often than not. his own chest is bare, freckled and scarred in places most people would be horrified to see marks but you are slowly learning the story behind each of them, as your own canvas is painted with the symbols befitting of si5. he snores, which keeps you up and your mind going hundreds of miles an hour but in your experience, a good night’s sleep is as elusive as a genuine conversation about personal matters in the office. that is to say, damn near impossible, for somewhere approaching the past twenty-odd years, or however long kepler’s held a job with goddard.

here you go again - thoughts fixed on people, appearing more and more these days although up until now you haven’t exactly had any people you actually  _ cared  _ about, besides your older brother. although. well. hah.

breakfast is yet another reminder of daniel’s torrid love affair with sugar, the side-piece to his long standing relationship with caffeine as he dumps four cubes of sugar into his cup and stirs it in with a yawn he doesn’t bother to cover, even though you and kepler both kick his shins below the table - him gently, you hard enough to earn a glare. he adds another cube and crushes it against the side of the cup before he takes a sip, licking deep brown droplets from his lips. kepler’s lip twists as he pours milk into his tea until it’s somewhere close to drinkable, and you meet his eyes as you drink your own coffee, seeing the amused crinkle in the corner of them as he rolls his eyes and nods towards daniel.

it’s nice, like this. the toast is burnt and the butter shittier than the kind you usually buy at home, but there’s no overhanging pressure to act like professionals for a little while and you can enjoy the crappy complimentary breakfast as though you’re normal people. you in your usual hoodie, pink bracelet on one wrist; daniel in his favoured band shirt and too-old jeans; kepler in a plain t-shirt and faded jeans you don’t think you’ve seen him in before, but have jacobi staring at his thighs in a way he doesn’t even attempt to pretend is subtle.

the dance begins again, you think, and don’t hide your smile as they kiss over the console of the rented car before you pull out of the parking lot, stereo crackling over years-old cd’s as you drive. the dance begins again, although it never truly stops, and you lean your head against the window behind the driver’s seat and close your eyes, letting old country, the sound of tarmac beneath the tyres and kepler’s humming serve as a backdrop to a few more hours of sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @sciencematter (send requests/asks anytime)
> 
> writing blog https://knewtonn.blogspot.com/
> 
> title from 'personally engraved' by alice fulton, found here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56464/personally-engraved


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